Megan Hallinan picks up a dog at Cargo City:

On any one day we have loads of goods passing through the world’s commercial centers, airports and harbors. You only pay attention to what is important to you at any one given time. For me, after standing around for four hours, I surmised that the order of precedence at least for this day at Cargo City was thus: the dead are moved off first, then the worms, then the breathing mammals. No amount of complaining or worried looks from behind my facemask would change this. Cargo City is one big nexus of “bigger than one single thing” transactions.

Moving around Ethan the Dog was in many ways simpler, but it had its own burdens. We flew with him overseas twice, once to Frankfurt and once to Oslo, and in both cases there was at least one brief panic, like the later-aborted rush to get a last minute rabies shot in Oslo, or the confusion in Dusseldorf about whether he was allowed to fly at all or not.

It’s rare to find commentary on ethical investing embedded in TV reviewing, so I was happy to find it in Sarah Miller’s She’d Like To Make An Unethical Investment - In Another Man’s Penis:

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that this show is some kind of secret project to advertise ethical investing while distracting you with poolside orgasms. Let’s just stick to the surface: this is a show about a woman ostensibly choosing between something risky and exciting and something safe and a little dull. The safe, dull thing, as represented by Cooper, is ethical investing. But ethical investing is not any different from any other investing. I don’t want to write a whole treatise laying this out, it’s just true that the only way to accumulate profit is to get people to create more value with their work than you actually pay them. This is not a political philosophy. This is a fact.

This fact has been the backbone of every single conversation I’ve had with investment advisors: I tell them I’m an anti-capitalist, they tell me about ethical investing, I tell them that the Rubicon for me is about investing at all, and that if I’m going to cross over I might as well invest in nuclear arms dealers and cigarette vending machines for children. And then we get stuck.

Which is why my modest portfolio remains 100% investing in credit union GICs (which, I imagine, are, alas, being invested on my behalf).

In Praise of Small Menus, by Rachel Sugar:

The first New York City restaurant I fell in love with served only one thing. I had not known this was a possibility. I had never encountered a restaurant that did not require me to make any decisions at all. Here is how it worked: You showed up at dinnertime. You got dinner. You didn’t have to take responsibility for your choices, because there were no choices. I felt like a very sophisticated baby. What I mean is, it was perfect.

Confronting the tyranny of choice is an unrealized opportunity in all manner of venues, from restaurants to bookstores.

Indeed, my favourite section of The Bookmark is the “Staff Picks” section (one of my as yet unrealized business ideas is a bookstore that sells just one book).

Beyond the familiar “who came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and punched me in the arm?!” feeling this morning, and a mild headache, I seem to have survived Shot Number Two unscathed.

But it was a good excuse to drive out to Victoria for a Factory Coffee at Island Chocolates, where Olivia took this photo of me.

The provincial vaccination clinic was as much a beautiful interlocking ballet of efficiency as the first time (April 22, a seeming eternity ago).

I learned a lot from my nurse about the places squirrels can nest (riding lawnmowers!), was told to take a Tylenol thirty minutes before bed, and sent on to the arrivals lounge to wait out my 15 minute danger window.

Another passage from Joe Biel’s The Autism Relationships Handbook:

A common joke in autistic circles is about the horrors of the allistic (non-autistic) disability. It goes roughly like this:

Person A: “Everyone around me has a disorder that makes them say things that they don’t mean, disregard rules and structure, not know how to ask a question in a format that will provide them with the answer that they seek, fail to focus on topics that are important’ to them, have unreliable memory, constantly express strange bits of coded language and hints, and creepily stare at my eyeballs.”

Person B: “So why do people think you’re weird?”

Person A: “Because they comprise over 98% of the population.”

I was attracted to Microcosm Publishing because of its novel subscribe-to-everything-we-publish offering, which I found by following links from Bikequity, which I found on the shelves at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal: I’ve been a devoted subscriber for coming up on two years.

It was only recently that I learned that co-founder Joe Biel is autistic, a prolific author himself, and that Microcosm has a deep back catalogue of books by autistic writers about autism. 

Sometimes I forget that I’m freckled. But then I sit for a close-up, and it’s inarguable. Witness:

I am modelling my new AirPods Pro, which I’ve been using for a week now, after a recommendation from my friend Sosi pushed me from cart, where they’d been languishing for months, to checkout. They arrived a few days later, and they are now seldom out of my ears.

While I like them as a music and podcast delivery system, the thing I like about them the absolute most is their noise-cancelling magic, magic that’s enough to have me wear them for that. I’ve come to learn, as a result, that there’s a lot of background noise in my life, slowly chipping away at my sanity. Cutting out that noise has mean measurable improvements in my work productivity and sense of general calm both.

I’ve generally averse to bundled services, as they almost always feel like a trap.

But I’ve started to be annoyed with the prominence of podcasts in Spotify: I’m happy happy and longtime Pocket Casts user, and I don’t want Spotify to be a podcast player (I also don’t want to support the de-freeing of podcasts that seems an inevitable part of Spotify’s recent moves).

So when my Apple TV+ subscription came up for renewal I bundled: Apple TV+, Apple Music and 2TB storage, plus a bunch of other stuff, for $33/month.

Marking this here simply to remind myself when I jumped, if and when I jump back.

There aren’t many interviews two hours and twenty minutes long that I would willingly sit through, but Van Neistat interviewed by Rich Roll is one of them. Filmmaking, sobriety, work, craft, money, and Werner Herzog.

Olivia and I have been proud to have contributed, in a small way, to the development of Purity Dairy’s new Oats & Barley beverage: over the last year we’ve been secreted out of the dairy with unmarked beta testing flagons. We’ve cooked with it (chocolate waffles!), steamed it up for coffee, made hot chocolate, and had it straight up, offering our feedback along the way.

And now it’s out in stores! It’s great to see a locally-developed-and-produced alternative to Big Oat Milk.